Strawberry Mead

Double brew day today. Brewing mead and beer.

When Kevin bought the honey from Fillmore, he bought too much. All I had to do was buy a little more and then we got enough for two batches of mead. Ellie likes strawberries. So I figure what the hell I'll make her some strawberry mead. The first adventure was finding strawberries. She had been eating these ones from the store for the last week and I thought they were bitter. I didn't want to be forced to use those strawberries. But then we found some poor guy sitting on the side of the road and he had a bunch. Ellie gets out and speaks the talk of her people and haggles the guy to $32 for 12lbs of strawberries. I gave him $35. Oops.

Anyhow now we got the berries it's time to cut them up which Ellie did. She cut them into eights and put them into a bucket of StarSan. I re-hydrated some wine yeast. I got 71B-1122 from MoreBeer. Two packets. That's 16 grams. Probably a little too much but that is better than too little since honey lacks nutrients for the yeast. The water I rehydrated in was luke warm water and I added 20grams of Go-Ferm nutrients. This seemed like a lot. I triple checked. Maybe I'm crazy, I don't know.

I got the fermenter ready to go and transferred the berries to the fermenter.

I began to heat the water when Ellie comes along to help pour in the honey. It's heavy and will sit on the bottom and scorch unless someone stirs it up. So we got that honey out of their containers and checked the gravity. Ellie had fun with the new refractometer. If measured at 1.115. Although it looked like distilled water measured in at 1.005. So I would say the gravity was 1.11. Nice!

Afterwards it was heated to 170 for 15min and then I cooled it like I did with Kevin's mead. I then transferred it to the fermenter and shook it up. I then went to add O2 and found that when I had sterilized the oxygen stone earlier in the day I melted a little bit of the rubber tubing which caused the O2 to rush out before it hit the stone. So I taped it up with plumbers tape and it seemed to work. I'll need to replace it next time.

Then I added the yeast nutrients (Ferm-K and DAP). And then I added the yeast. I then shook it all up and it now sits in the bar area.

BTW, those strawberries were wonderful. They looked great. Tasted good too.